i (a 69 year old c++ dev) use it for writing interactive xmas & birthday cards - it really is great! give it a try.
Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
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Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#32With LLM's, Scratch is probably a closer interface to the sort of programming we'll all be doing in the near future.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#33My 9 year old daughter surprised me yesterday with her little game made with Scratch. I was impressed. I surprised her back when I did user-testing haha. She discovered the fun world of bugs and user's doing things they shouldn't!
I LOL'ed! You really brought out the QA and product testing on her, haha!
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#34Can you run scratch locally?
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#35When people use scratch with their kids, what tutorials do they follow? Do they try and figure things out from first principles, or are their popular content creators who make stuff? How do people transition their kids from scratch to Python? From my experience teaching, it seems like it's really hard for kids to make that transition.
Great questions, and good timing. My daughter asked about learning "line programming" instead of "block programming" yesterday. Finally, out of 3 kids one is interested! Now what do I do?! Python, I'm assuming, but following what curriculum?
How about p5.js
Graphics centric which imo is easier to keep kids engaged.
The coding train yet channel has tons of videos on P5.js
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#36Scratch also has a plugins for BBC Micro:bit and Lego Boost. They work well although the old Boost hardware is lacking storage so only works in Bluetooth tethered mode. The solutions have two parts: 1. a side application to facilitate the Bluetooth connection from the web browser to the device; 2. additional block types to control the servos etc.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#37I find Scratch so confusing. So many menu options, drop downs , select here click here. Very frustrating experience. I don't think my child (8 years old) learns coding from it. I'm trying to find away to introduce him to Basic. But he looses interest once he sees just lines. Scratch is flashy and things can be moved and clicked which is what the kids are used now, but I just don't see any educational or fun value add…
Can you start him with JavaScript and basic web development instead? That's how I learned around that age (started around 5 or 6). The immediate feedback of being able to change something in text and immediately see the impact was a big thing that helped me. Likewise, something like helping him mod games he plays might be good.
Scratch always kind of struck me as a non-programmer's idea of how to teach children to code personally. (Or at least programmers that didn't start/weren't active as children).
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#38Looks kinda similar to early Flash, which was my first real programming experience. Actionscript had a similar visual programming tool back then and you could also switch to "text mode" if you wanted to see what those visual blocks meant as a code. And it came with an amazing offline help manual. Flash/Macromedia was start of my career basically
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#39I'd imagine learning at least a little Python alongside Scratch would be more optimal than Scratch alone. It's like bilingual education, it has great benefits although individuals may gravitate towards a preferred option. Perhaps it's a bit like comparing Minecraft to Factorio: https://www.idtech.com/blog/scratch-vs-python Looking around, it also seems possible to set up your own Scratch server, which is comparable t…
Other platforms similar to Scratch actually teach Python!
They start off with drag and drop coding and then Python. The Python is actually pretty fun, you write code to make animals move around and get stars.
Re: Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children
#40When people use scratch with their kids, what tutorials do they follow? Do they try and figure things out from first principles, or are their popular content creators who make stuff? How do people transition their kids from scratch to Python? From my experience teaching, it seems like it's really hard for kids to make that transition.
There is a marvelous app designed to solve exactly this problem called Pytch: https://www.pytch.org/app/